Bush or Kerry?
Look Closely and the Danger is the Sameby John Pilgerwww.dissidentvoice.org
March 6, 2004First Published in
John Pilger.com

A
myth equal to the fable of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is gaining
strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a
world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow as
Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the "anyone but Bush" movement
becomes a liberal cause celebre.

While the rise to power of the Bush gang, the
neoconservatives, belatedly preoccupied the American media, the message of
their equivalents in the Democratic Party has been of little interest. Yet
the similarities are compelling. Shortly before Bush's "election" in 2000,
the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative pressure
group, published an ideological blueprint for "maintaining global US
pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the
international security order in line with American principles and
interests". Every one of its recommendations for aggression and conquest was
adopted by the administration.

One year later, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm
of the Democratic Leadership Council, published a
19-page manifesto for the "New Democrats", who include all the principal
Democratic Party candidates, and especially John Kerry. This called for "the
bold exercise of American power" at the heart of "a new Democratic strategy,
grounded in the party's tradition of muscular internationalism". Such a
strategy would "keep Americans safer than the Republicans' go-it-alone
policy, which has alienated our natural allies and overstretched our
resources. We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of US global leadership
..."

What is the
difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Bush? Apart from
euphemisms, there is none. All the Democratic presidential candidates
supported the invasion of Iraq, bar one: Howard Dean Kerry not only
voted for the invasion, but expressed his disappointment that it had not
gone according to plan. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "Did I expect George
Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." Neither
Kerry nor any of the other candidates has called for an end to the bloody
and illegal occupation; on the contrary, all of them have demanded more
troops for Iraq. [Editor's note: Alas, Pilger is unaware that Democratic
candidate Dennis Kucinich opposed the invasion, and has called for the end
of the US occupation of Iraq]. Kerry has called for another "40,000 active
service troops". He has supported Bush's continuing bloody assault on
Afghanistan, and the administration's plans to "return Latin America to
American leadership" by subverting democracy in Venezuela.

Above all, he has not in any way challenged the notion of
American military supremacy throughout the world that has pushed the number
of US bases to more than 750. Nor has he alluded to the Pentagon's coup
d'etat in Washington and its stated goal of "full spectrum dominance". As
for Bush's "pre-emptive" policy of attacking other countries, that's fine,
too. Even the most liberal of the Democratic bunch, Howard Dean, said he was
prepared to use "our brave and remarkable armed forces" against any
"imminent threat". That's how Bush himself put it.

What the New Democrats object to is the Bush gang's
outspokenness - its crude honesty, if you like - in stating its plans
openly, and not from behind the usual veil or in the usual specious code of
imperial liberalism and its "moral authority". New Democrats of Kerry's sort
are all for the American empire; understandably, they would prefer that
those words remained unsaid. "Progressive internationalism" is far more
acceptable.

Just as the plans of the Bush gang were written by the
neoconservatives, so John Kerry in his campaign book, A Call to Service,
lifts almost word for word the New Democrats' warmongering manifesto. "The
time has come," he writes, "to revive a bold vision of progressive
internationalism" along with a "tradition" that honours "the tough-minded
strategy of international engagement and leadership forged by Wilson and
Roosevelt... and championed by Truman and Kennedy in the cold war". Almost
identical thoughts appear on page three of the New Democrats' manifesto:

As Democrats, we are proud of our party's tradition of
tough-minded internationalism and strong record in defending America.
Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman led the
United States to victory in two world wars... [Truman's policies] eventually
triumphed in the cold war. President Kennedy epitomized America's commitment
to "the survival and success of liberty".

Mark the historical lies in that statement: the "victory"
of the US with its brief intervention in the First World War; the
airbrushing of the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the Second World
War; the American elite's non-existent "triumph" over internally triggered
events that brought down the Soviet Union; and John F Kennedy's famous
devotion to "liberty" that oversaw the deaths of some three million people
in Indo-China.

"Perhaps the most repulsive section of [his] book,"
writes Mark Hand, editor of Press Action, the American media monitoring
group, "is where Kerry discusses the Vietnam war and the anti-war movement."
Self-promoted as a war hero, Kerry briefly joined the protest movement on
his return from Vietnam. In this twin capacity, he writes: "I say to both
conservative and liberal misinterpretations of that war that it's time to
get over it and recognize it as an exception, not as a ruling example of the
US military engagements of the 20th century."

"In this one passage," writes Hand, "Kerry seeks to
justify the millions of people slaughtered by the US military and its
surrogates during the 20th century [and] suggests that concern about US war
crimes in Vietnam is no longer necessary... Kerry and his colleagues in the
'progressive internationalist' movement are as gung-ho as their counterparts
in the White House... Come November, who will get your vote? Coke or Pepsi?"

The "anyone but Bush" movement objects to the Coke-Pepsi
analogy, and Ralph Nader is the current source of their ire. In Britain,
seven years ago, similar derision was heaped upon those who pointed out the
similarities between Tony Blair and his heroine Margaret Thatcher -
similarities which have since been proven. "It's a nice and convenient myth
that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote
the Guardian commentator Hywel Williams. "But the imperialism of the liberal
may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature - its conviction that
it represents a superior form of life."

Like the Blairites, John Kerry and his fellow New
Democrats come from a tradition of liberalism that has built and defended
empires as "moral" enterprises. That the Democratic Party has left a longer
trail of blood, theft and subjugation than the Republicans is heresy to the
liberal crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a
noble mantle.

As the New Democrats' manifesto rightly points out, the
Democrats' "tough-minded internationalism" began with Woodrow Wilson, a
Christian megalomaniac who believed that America had been chosen by God "to
show the way to the nations of this world, how they shall walk in the paths
of liberty". In his wonderful new book, The Sorrows of Empire (Verso),
Chalmers Johnson writes:

With Woodrow Wilson, the intellectual foundations of
American imperialism were set in place. Theodore Roosevelt... had
represented a European-driven, militaristic vision of imperialism backed by
nothing more substantial than the notion that the manifest destiny of the
United States was to govern racially inferior Latin Americans and east
Asians. Wilson laid over that his own hyper-idealistic, sentimental and
ahistorical idea [of American world dominance]. It was a political project
no less ambitious and no less passionately held than the vision of world
communism launched at almost the same time by the leaders of the Bolshevik
revolution.

It was the Wilsonian Democratic administration of Harry
Truman, following the Second World War, that created the militaristic
"national security state" and the architecture of the cold war: the CIA, the
Pentagon and the National Security Council. As the only head of state to use
atomic weapons, Truman authorized troops to intervene anywhere "to defend
free enterprise". In 1945, his administration set up the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund as agents of US economic imperialism. Later,
using the "moral" language of Woodrow Wilson, John F Kennedy invaded Vietnam
and unleashed the US special forces as death squads; they now operate on
every continent.

Bush has been a beneficiary of this. His neoconservatives
derive not from traditional Republican Party roots, but from the hawk's
wings of the Democratic Party - such as the trade union establishment, the
AFL-CIO (known as the "AFL-CIA"), which received millions of dollars to
subvert unions and political parties throughout the world, and the weapons
industry, built and nurtured by the Democratic senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson. Paul Wolfowitz, Bush's leading fanatic, began his Washington
political life working for Jackson. In 1972 an aberration, George McGovern,
faced Richard Nixon as the Democrats' anti-war candidate. Virtually
abandoned by the party and its powerful backers, McGovern was crushed.

Bill Clinton, hero of the Blairites, learned the lesson
of this. The myths spun around Clinton's "golden era of liberalism" are, in
retrospect, laughable. Savour this obsequious front-page piece by the
Guardian's chief political correspondent, reporting Clinton's speech to the
Labour Party conference in 2002:

Bill Clinton yesterday used a mesmerizing oration... in a
subtle and delicately balanced address [that] captured the imagination of
delegates in Blackpool's Winter Gardens... Observers also described the
speech as one of the most impressive and moving in the history of party
conferences. The trade and industry secretary, Patricia Hewitt, described it
as "absolutely brilliant".

An accompanying editorial gushed: "In an intimate, almost
conversational tone, speaking only from notes, Bill Clinton delivered the
speech of a true political master... If one were reviewing it, five stars
would not be enough... What a speech. What a pro. And what a loss to the
leadership of America and the world."

No idolatry was enough. At the Hay-on-Wye literary
festival, the leader of "the third way" and of "progressive
internationalism" received a long line of media and Blair people who hailed
him as a lost leader, "a champion of the centre left".

The truth is that Clinton was little different from Bush,
a crypto-fascist. During the Clinton years, the principal welfare safety
nets were taken away and poverty in America increased sharply; a
multibillion-dollar missile "defence" system known as Star Wars II was
instigated; the biggest war and arms budget in history was approved;
biological weapons verification was rejected, along with a comprehensive
nuclear test ban treaty, the establishment of an international criminal
court and a worldwide ban on landmines. Contrary to a myth that places the
blame on Bush, the Clinton administration in effect destroyed the movement
to combat global warming.

In addition, Haiti and Afghanistan were invaded, the
illegal blockade of Cuba was reinforced and Iraq was subjected to a medieval
siege that claimed up to a million lives while the country was being
attacked, on average, every third day: the longest Anglo-American bombing
campaign in history. In the 1999 Clinton-led attack on Serbia, a "moral
crusade", public transport, non-military factories, food processing plants,
hospitals, schools, museums, churches, heritage-listed monasteries and farms
were bombed. "They ran out of military targets in the first couple of
weeks," said James Bissett, the Canadian former ambassador to Yugoslavia.
"It was common knowledge that Nato went to stage three: civilian targets."
In their cruise missile attack on Sudan, Clinton's generals targeted and
destroyed a factory producing most of sub-Saharan Africa's pharmaceutical
supplies. The German ambassador to Sudan reported: "It is difficult to
assess how many people in this poor country died as a consequence... but
several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess."

Covered in euphemisms, such as "democracy-building" and
"peacekeeping", "humanitarian intervention" and "liberal intervention", the
Clintonites can boast a far more successful imperial record than Bush's
neo-cons, largely because Washington granted the Europeans a ceremonial
role, and because Nato was "onside". In a league table of death and
destruction, Clinton beats Bush hands down.

A question that New Democrats like to ask is: "What would
Al Gore have done if he had not been cheated of the presidency by Bush?"
Gore's top adviser was the arch-hawk Leon Fuerth, who said the US should
"destroy the Iraqi regime, root and branch". Joseph Lieberman, Gore's
running mate in 2000, helped to get Bush's war resolution on Iraq through
Congress. In 2002, Gore himself declared that an invasion of Iraq "was not
essential in the short term" but "nevertheless, all Americans should
acknowledge that Iraq does, indeed, pose a serious threat". Like Blair, what
Gore wanted was an "international coalition" to cover long-laid plans for
the takeover of the Middle East. His complaint against Bush was that, by
going it alone, Washington could "weaken our ability to lead the world in
this new century".

Collusion between the Bush and Gore camps was common.
During the 2000 election,
Richard Holbrooke, who probably would have become Gore's secretary of
state, conspired with Paul Wolfowitz to ensure their respective candidates
said nothing about US policy towards Indonesia's blood-soaked role in
south-east Asia. "Paul and I have been in frequent touch," said Holbrooke,
"to make sure we keep [East Timor] out of the presidential campaign, where
it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests." The same can be
said of Israel's ruthless, illegal expansion, of which not a word was and is
said: it is a crime with the full support of both Republicans and Democrats.

John Kerry supported the removal of millions of poor
Americans from welfare rolls and backed extending the death penalty. The
"hero" of a war that is documented as an atrocity launched his presidential
campaign in front of a moored aircraft carrier. He has attacked Bush for not
providing sufficient funding to the National Endowment for Democracy, which,
wrote the historian William Blum, "was set up by the CIA, literally, and for
20 years has been destabilizing governments, progressive movements, labour
unions and anyone else on Washington's hit list". Like Bush - and all those
who prepared the way for Bush, from Woodrow Wilson to Bill Clinton - Kerry
promotes the mystical "values of American power" and what the writer Ariel
Dorfman has called "the plague of victimhood... Nothing more dangerous: a
giant who is afraid."

People who are aware of such danger, yet support its
proponents in a form they find agreeable, think they can have it both ways.
They can't. Michael Moore, the film-maker, should know this better than
anyone; yet he backed the Nato bomber Wesley Clark as Democratic candidate.
The effect of this is to reinforce the danger to all of us, because it says
it is OK to bomb and kill, then to speak of peace. Like the Bush regime, the
New Democrats fear truly opposing voices and popular movements: that is,
genuine democracy, at home and abroad. The colonial theft of Iraq is a case
in point. "If you move too fast," says Noah Feldman, a former legal adviser
to the US regime in Baghdad, "the wrong people could get elected." Tony
Blair has said as much in his inimitable way: "We can't end up having an
inquiry into whether the war [in Iraq] was right or wrong. That is something
that we have got to decide. We are the politicians."

John Pilger is a
renowned investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker. His latest
documentary film, “Breaking the Silence: Truth and Lies in the War on
Terror” was broadcast on the ITV network in the UK on September 22. In
2003, Pilger was named the winner of the Sophie Prize,
one of the world's most distinguished
environmental and development prizes. He
was also named Media Personality of the Year at the 2003 EMMA awards.
His latest book is
The New Rulers of the World (Verso, 2002). Visit John Pilger’s
website at:
http://www.johnpilger.com